I am not Mohamed, but about 5 years ago i also was a police officer in the Middle East.My hobby always was Programming and hacking from age of 13 so i have visited Hackernews on a daily basis until i quit my job and started to work as a Web developer for 1/4 of an average pay rate.

Fast forward 5 years and i am in a much better place now and i never look back.

I never did this before because i always thought that all the people that work in IT are way smarter than me and have all sort of degrees that i could not handle. Thank you HN :)

Not the person you asked, but I can relate: I worked in law enforcement for 14 years, many of those as a jail officer. I've been a "hardware hacker" since I was a kid, and it's more or less what I do for a living right now, but I don't have any formal education in it so it's been nearly impossible to find a really great job in the field. I came across Hacker News many years ago on one of the other tech sites I frequent (probably OS News).

I'm actually considering going back to law enforcement (again, in the jail) as it's steady employment with great benefits, and plenty of time off to work on side projects.

He seems interested in startups. Google would have redirected him here. Beside that, popular startup sites often quote HN in articles.

If I were to guess - reading news lead to getting interested about startups, and reading about those led him to YC and HN.

But there's an alternative way people from various fields may end up here - HN discussions are sometimes top results when googling for some niche, not necessarily tech-related topics.

This is not in any way meant to sound snarky, but I don't live under a rock. Hacker News will come to you or you will go to it when you question the trajectory of your life.